Duality

I asked Jeremiah to write a piece for my blog. He's bad at keeping friends and I'm okay at it, but only because I do stupid shit like ask old friends to write pieces for my blog.

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I've been thinking a lot about duality.

I know this isn't a new thought or idea - yin and yang- but it's been on my mind a lot whenever I stop to think. To me, duality is the coexistence - I'll go as far to say codependence - of a positive and a negative. Light and dark, good and bad, even protons and electrons. The world is full of examples that demonstrate this concept of two.

While it first started as an idea of emotions - happiness vs. sadness - the more I thought about emotion, the more it seemed to reflect bigger ideas, such as morality, religion, and existence. I'm not usually one to contemplate existence or religion very much, but having and taking the time to think on a small matter such as my emotions seemed to lend itself to eventual larger influential concepts. I'm not the smartest person, so if these ideas and words seem derivative I apologize, but this is howI think.

Emotions are tough to understand. I think a sign of a mature and disciplined mind is the ability to understand, process, and control reaction to emotion. To not make decisions based on emotion, because emotions are temporary. No one is consistently happy or always sad, though I believe there are people who have a tendency towards specific emotions. Some people take situations and respond in a generally excited, happy way, while others respond in a generally despondent and resigned way - my definition of optimists and pessimists. But when you can take a situation that is objectively negative - a breakup or the death of a loved one - and respond in a neutral way, a sort of middle ground where it affects you but not to the point where the situation controls or defines you, that to me is really a human characteristic. "Time heals all", but no where does it say how, yet time and time again, people overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to come out on top.

Duality is part of life, but to me neutrality is the way to deal with the ups and downs. Moderation, finding a middle ground between euphoria and depression that allows a person to be happy whenever possible but allows someone to be sad, too. One of my favorite quotes from an ex-girlfriend in high school is "it's okay to not be okay." Until that point I thought that the only way to be "okay" was to be happy all the time. But now I don't believe that life is about finding one thing that makes you happy, it's about the journey - both good and bad experiences - that make you whole. This was furthered when I read "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho - which I highly suggest reading - and my interpretation of the message from the book was just that: the journey is the most important thing. Too often I get hung up on what went wrong, or what went right that I don't take the time to think of the next step. Because whether or not you take the time to consider it, time moves on, and that good or bad experience is over and done with.

Good and bad, God or Satan, happiness or sadness. We all find ourselves somewhere between these two ideas, neither good nor bad, neither God or Satan, not always happy or always sad. And I think it's within these extremes that humanity exists and thrives. Metaphorically, a neutron.